hired
I got a job. It's a v- with Microsoft. I'll be saying more soon, I need to go buy a car now.
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I got a job. It's a v- with Microsoft. I'll be saying more soon, I need to go buy a car now.
Watching West Wing reruns, Josh tells Donna to "Do a Google Search" to check the background on her former teacher, before pursuing a presidential proclamation for her work.
Donna: "Because she might be a lesbian?"
Josh: "If she's a lesbian we could talk, but what if she's a bicycle thief? Do a Google search."
Either a) the writers of TWW at the time did not understand that Google only has access to information that is indexable and online. A thorough background check involves information that is neither. It's actually quite hard to get the kind of information Josh was suggesting via google. Or b) the writers were using Google in the meta-brand kind of way, to refer to searching in general, such as "Can I have a kleenex?" This is actually very cool for Google if so.
Turkey is one of my favorite meals, especially since I got so good a preparing it (she says smugly). However, today without even a bite of the leftovers I put the whole thing into ziplocks of various sizes and into the freezer. I'm fighting a stomach bug, which started the day before Thanksgiving and is still very much alive. I can't blame the turkey, if I did it'd be in the trash and not the freezer. Perhaps I'll enjoy it next year. Until then, it's nursery food. Scrambled eggs. Rice. Pretzels.
Now that Heather has started this trend, I just had to jump in. The rules are, take 4 or so search strings from your referrer log, and write a poem. Here are my strings:
ambiguous reference
pictures of couch potatoes
warm chair attrition
wonderful distraction
And, I really don't know what this means, but here goes:
The Saga of Penelope Flair
Here sat Penelope, alone on the stair
On a day when distraction was ruling the air
She was moving quite out of her apartment, you see
The landlord was coming at quarter to three
But lodged in between the fourth stair and the fifth
Was the left side of the couch. She could easily lift
it Alone and inside an empty room
But lodged between stairs it's a tantamount tomb
The fact that it's stuck could sap all her ambition
For completing this move, a most shocking attrition
She was helpless against its ambiguous state
And sat right below it to contemplate
Who could she ask to puzzle it through,
She had named all her neighbors when names would not do.
Could it be Skeezer, or Creepy, or Andre Couscou?
Nobody answered her calls over there
So sitting quite stuckly was Penelope Flair
With scuffs on her shoes and some gum in her hair
Her pictures still mounted, a task yet to do
And lodged in her mind the old capers too
A man in a skirt with flagrant long hair
Is laughing quite hard at Penelope Flair
Who's taking the picture, that rascal, that hack
Her reference is pointing indirectedly back
Only Penelope knows she's just wearing a pack.
Someone will save her
She doesn't know who
She knows that the next place she lives in will do
She'll soon eat potatoes warm from the bowl
In her favorite chair that's good for her soul
In her favorite chair that matches this couch
What in the world will she do with this couch
And she gets an idea, and goes down the stairs
Borrows a chainsaw from Creepy who remains unawares
And she saws away loudly at the couch on her own
With imagined help that she has not known
From wonderful neighbors and good times that have gone
And not for a moment does the think that it's wrong.
For when landlord comes and walks up the stair
He knows not a glimmer of the murder up there
Committed in secret by Penelope Flair.
I've been looking forward to this weekend for about a year. Funny, I didn't realize I was looking forward to it until now. Most of you will think of it as an ordinary, even boring weekend. Sitting around getting enough sleep, watching movies. Good ones, like "Witness" and "As Good as It Gets." I admit it's all because my 4 year old is gone overnight. Who I love and miss. And who is impossible to watch a movie with.
Yesterday, my dh asked me about entertainment. What do you do when the world places undue emphasis on entertainment over anything else when deciding whether a work has value. Which got me thinking. Should entertainment be smilarly valued when raising a kid? If you deliver entertainment at a smilar quantity to what the culture values, you KNOW that is bad parenting. But what percentage? The customary 2hours of screen time a day? And why is that percentage sometimes/often lower that we would give ourselves? Because today, I am acutely conscious of watching tons of TV because there is nobody around to corrupt.
The sound of screeching is conspicuously absent at the moment. Noodle salad. Good times.
Everyone who is a parent of a youngun should view this report on 60 minutes about generation Y. Raised by boomers with univerally high ideals, the financial means to achieve them (thanks to the stock market boom in the 80s), and one big burden. The boomers recognized that with every "have" story (the aforementioned high ideals and bank accounts) there's a rising class of "have not's," which means you can't trust the world any more. Generation Y was not put out to pasture, they were programmed and micromanaged. I'll venture that Generation X was perhaps the last generation to be sent outside to play. It's the loss of this exploratory time that you can either substitute with entertainment, or something structured. As Generation X parents, we are skeptical about all three corners of the triangle:
ENTERTAINMENT: Mind pollution, Only there for commercial gain
FREE EXPLORATORY TIME: Someone will snatch them up. It's actually borderline neglect to send them off the way we were, the way my parents were sent off. My grandmother said to my mom,"OK kids, breakfast's over, we'll see you at lunch. Take your brother, go play outside." The brother being, perhaps, 2. My other grandmother said to my dad perhaps nothing at all, the house was so small it was understood he would be outside in the wilds all day. Even my own folks would let me walk home from school the long way, with my bratty friends, taking until dinnertime through the ravine. They'd be mad, but they wouldn't call the police. 10 minutes of unaccounted time and I'd call the police, guaranteed. I also plan on subscribing to this plan.
STRUCTURED TIME: I have a healthy skepticism for this as well. Not every kid is a good fit for soccer or ballet, or even high school. Plus it's just *so* much work. "No TV, this is art time dear."
The real question is how to come up with a Generation X style of raising kids that is responsible, but freeing, and recognition that micromanaging your kids is different from helping them grow into adults.
Yes, I've seen the ads Google has put out in the Seattle area for new employees. One I just had to start laughing at, which was three puzzles perhaps 32x32 pixels square, each pixel either black or white, on the side of a bus. This was a phenomenally complex image, and unless google wants to hire people who are really bored, and spend time at bus stops during layovers in the middle of the night, I don't know what they were thinking. Perhaps if my camera phone was back from vacation...
Update: After reading the december issue of Wired, I think these bitmaps are a new 2-d scanning replacement for UPC. Apparently it's working right now with scanners built into phones in Japan. Or I could just do a google search on the puzzler I suppose.
I was clicking on this link to register for this Live Meeting, and thinking: Wouldn't this be a better way to build a company? People who are interested in this stuff?
It looks like there has been a surge of e-mail spam lately, with spoofed addresses originating from these domains. People don't understand spoofing, and think the domains have some control over this happening. Thus the corrective steps by the domains tend to be more radical than technically necessary, because they are more of a PR fix rather than a useful one.
After a bit of searching, here are some obvious fix steps for hotmail (note that I'm just the messenger here) that folks on slashdot recommend.
- implement "Domain Keys" for all outgoing mail and hope other domains do the same (Here's someone who doesn't think that will work)
- look for the X-originating IP instead of the supposed incoming address to initiate blocking
- quickly patch the vulnerability newly discovered for automating these mails
I would like to vehemently offer that blocking all incoming mail from yahoo accounts is NOT a step hotmail should be taking. If they do take this step, there should be a publicized web page that gives current status on this situation, as well as the returned mails should also contain informative text.
It is not clear as of this point why sending mail to hotmail from a legitimate yahoo account is failing.
You know what I miss the most about Macintosh computers? The "sleep now" and "never sleep" corners of the screen. By moving the mouse there, you made your choice. This was a good design because, even though it seemed like a non sequitur (why does mouse placement control screen states), it is the handiest solution to a problem that requires easy access to solve. I suppose people who thought they know better have since decided to abolish (or not implement in Windows) this functionality, bowing the the supposedly robust and multifaceted functionality of the start-shut down menu and its matrix of options. And then there is all the automatic functionality built into laptops, none of which operate quite right yet either. No forms in triplicate please, just simple control of the screen for those unusual exceptions.
I looked at Macs on craigslist yesterday, in hopes of trying iCal. Still too much $$ for an osX mac.
PIM POU stands for Personal Information Manager Point of Use. It's a term I made up. It's fun to say. You can say, "Does it have PIM POU?" and "Show me the PIM POU!"
You all know what a Personal Information Manager is. Point of Use is something like Point of Sale for your debit card. Point of use is that moment when you are in the real world, and you have the need to interact with your PIM to take in information. Currently this is done clumsily, via typing or inking or T9 on your cell. If that wasn't bad enough, there's the synchronization that needs to happen once you get to some internet-connected home base later. Added reverse-icing is the extra publication step, if that information is going to be any good to anyone else. Sheesh, no wonder most people don't keep an online, shareable set of calendar / task / contacts.
PIM POU is integrating this with this. Or this.
And my brain is whirring on how to hook it all up. (Russell, are you reading this? Help!) It seems to me the critical success factors are:
* This must be working on people's existing camera phones. This means it must work on existing software. We need to talk carriers into autodownloading a watch turd that will recognize when a PIM POU has been shot, and then automatically grab and install the processing software for integration.
* We need big help on the data side, because this information should be all server-side. Yes, there's offline mode, but your master copy is on the server. Which reminds me, I do need to write that privacy policy manifesto.
* We need an extended license for people to print their own barcodes on flyers they produce themselves. This is no longer a business to business thing, it has to be as free to use as a text editors. Which means somebody needs to buy somebody's company, or else replicate the barcode thing from scratch.
All this is premised on the following statement. The #1 blocking thing (as well as the #1 benefit) for the future of calendaring rests on solving the point of use problem. More details: the fact that you have to do data entry and synch is the #1 blocker for integrated calendaring. If you could have your true calendar all the time, with easy data entry and no synching, integrated calendaring would be the next killer app. E-mail is the widely recognized killer app for the internet. Calendaring is to e-mail as concerts are to concert reviews. Right now, we're all passing around concert reviews, and we think we're happy. We haven't even shown up to the concert!
OK, dropping the metaphor, the next generation of calendaring has the most potential to change people's lives than any other concept in a similar stage of infancy that I've seen. I just need to figure out how to do it without putting the world on pause, and assembling a crack team of 12 developers to solve the problem while the world stands still.
as in "magnum"
Today I finished my important-and-urgent list early, and moved right onto my important-but-not-urgent list. At the top of that is to watch some Channel9 videos already. It turned into a day of sleuthing, but never fear, my trusty search agents were nearby.
After forgetting both my logon and my password (for some reason, I chose egrigg as a logon rather than my usual egrigg9000 - I'm currently at page 5 of the "E"s if you want to see a picture), I started with the latest videos first: the tablet guy and the photostory guy, more on them later. Then came Larry. Immediately I said "Oh, THAT Larry!" For he was the guy in the meetings I attended with the WMDG, as I was getting a handle on how the team worked and what the challenges were in order to decide what features to add to their website. I was the fly on the wall, Larry definitely engaged in the problem at hand. He has several videos up on Channel9 right now, and I haven't yet viewed them all.
Did I mention I'm bad at names? Well, I also remembered Larry coincidentally from one - make it two - new weblogs I'm reading, as well as one weblog I've been reading for a while. But I forgot which ones. Immediately I pulled up Outlook and ran a system crunching search on my NewsGator folder for his name. Simultaneously, I opened up history in IE and ran a history search for his name, because it was just yesterday after all. All this was local searching so I got to look at videos at the same time. I got hits on all counts. Note that this hardly ever happens that a) I remember a name, and b) a search from either of these sources returns anything useful. Here's the additional Larry stuff I've encountered in the last two days:
KC Lemson's mention of him on her site, as a person with great hindsight.
Adam Barr's article on having lunch with him, and the inequity of the reverse Kanji triple toe Lutz question.
Larry does his own article on the Exchange Team's group blog, on the "Me Too" effect, which I read about from Jeremy Zadowny at yahoo.
That's a lot for the past couple of days, eh? The moral of the story is, viewing Channel9 videos can be very useful for intergrating written information (blogs) with your real life (work). And here's Larry.
The way to get the word "Trackback" on your entries, with a little number in parenthesis, is to create a post that allows pings. It's not enough to simply rebuid the site. You're welcome.
After getting my computer back from its day of beauty, I have reinstalled Kunal Das's software to enable my link blog. Some relevant notes:
* If I ever do this again, do not have amnesia and forget about this last step of installation.
* My plan is, rather than to do raw uncommented quoting, is to preface each entry with
* Third priority to all of that is working on the excerpt feature
I'm happy to see the funny bell character problem has gone away.
If you're into new things, and new people, then why not check out your referrer log for sites that people left in order to come to yours?
I'll tell you why. No, maybe I won't. Suffice it to say that if you have ever had comment spam, this is a really bad way of doing research.
Now I have to go wash my eyeballs. Excuse me.
Dave Winer is at my hangout! Where am I? Oh yeah, since now I can "afford" wi-fi at home, I don't go to Victrola anymore. The only exception is when I'm curious what people are wearing this year, it's like vogue magazine for the coffehouse set. Dave, you'd better pull out those Cole Haans, it's now or never!
Here is a post I wrote on my tablet, back when I had it, and back at Victrola. This was a fun blog format, using CityDesk. But waay too much work to keep under the 50 file limit, and to post text RSS feeds using the ink to text translator. Imagemaps for the hyperlinks, all that nonsense. It was fun though.
P.S. on weblog URLs: I definitely need to find a comprehensive solution for my weblog URLs, as this post from a year ago has more google juice than my current mtpub subdirectory, because that's the one referenced from my first Radio weblog. (My first Radio weblog has one link from Scoble, and that has made all the difference. Too bad I switched URLs twice since then, eh?)
The day before yesterday I sat down with an interview consultant through WorkSource. This is a free service in the state of Washington, and you don't have to be on unemployment - there are no restrictions at all for using the service. We spent a small amount of time going through existing material that is probably new for other people: how to prepare for an interview, general tips, and nonverbal cues. What's nice about a one on one session is you can skip right past materials you are familiar with, and get to new ground.
The interesting thing about this discussion was that neither I nor the consultant knew what the new ground was going to be.
In talking very broadly and openly about how my past interviews have gone, I concentrated hard on the disconnect. The disconnect is kindof like an algebra problem:
Good Performance + Disconnect = No offer
I understood the good performance, this is the sum total of my resume, the phone screen, and the interview itself. So that is a known quantity. The no offer is as well a known quantity, it's quite straightforward. Since obviously a good performance equals an offer once you have hit a statistically significant number of interviews (and I believe I have), then something must be creeping up on the left side of the equation. It is completely unknown. But like an astronomer studying red shift, I'll try some theories and see what sticks.
In my discussion with my consultant, we first started on the theory that there was something I was doing that was poisoning the soup, but could not in and of itself be called a bad interview. For example, if a person asks a question such as "what is your worst quality" or "talk about a project that went badly" I strongly believe in answering the question directly, rather than faking it with "I'm a perfectionist" or "Let's talk about someone else's bad project that I saved." I felt despair at the thought of encouraging my storytelling nature by setting up a new rule to never talk about anything bad. I'll call this the Pollyanna theory.
Then there was another theory. I realized there was a point in the course of the interview where the interviewer displayed some puzzling things to me, such as a) explaining why I don't want the job, or b) talking about their dog, or c) taking a phone call when it rings, or d) shuffling through papers looking for more material to talk about. I thought that this was just because the interviewer was incredibly busy and not very well prepared. After more reflection with my consultant I realized there was one pivot point where all my interviews with this dynamic shifted subtly, and that's when the interviewer asks "Do you have any questions for me?" The trick is, they ask it EARLY. I call this the Early Closers theory, and it's the one that's sticking.
Now, why would someone in an interview setting ask a candidate if they had any questions early, effectively cutting short the entire interview. They could be tired. They could be nice people, and want me to have a rest, and by theoretically asking them questions I would get that rest. (In actuality, this "what questions" stage is the hardest part of the interview, and the most challenging part for the candidate, which is why if you give it more time, there is more room for error). When I think back on all my interviews, the ones that have gone the best is when the interviewer forgets to prompt me at all for my questions. When I get the prompt at the end, the interview tends to go OK. When the interviewer attempts an early close, that always goes poorly. And it's tricky, because you might have done the first part of the interview really great. It's a fallacy to think that your material will be judged on that part of the interview only, and the candidate-driven questions will be a break for you. The candidate-driven question period is when you are in charge of the interview, and the material must be good, good enough to be relevant to the job, perk the interviewer's interest, show your background in a good light, and make the interviewer not want to change the channel. Because that's what they just did: change the channel, to the YOU channel, and it had better be riveting.
Granted that this is the hardest part of interviews, and that's a way of explaining why you might have tripped up and not noticed. However, the other dynamic involved with early closers is, they are doing this because THEY HAVE CHOSEN ANOTHER CANDIDATE ALREADY before you even walked in. It's like planning to watch Lord of the Rings and a classic Seinfeld that you've already seen comes on. There is no way you're going to stick with Seinfeld.
I'm still looking for a remedy for the early closer situation that would result in a job offer. Right now, all my ideas center on, well, it's not my fault and better luck next time. Or I can deal with the situation straightforwardly and say, let's save us both some time and talk about Halo2 or something else amusing. This seems crass to me. I would love to recognise the early closer situations, and be able to turn the decision around back to me being the prime candidate. No ideas for how to do this without knowing my competition.
I've started adding to my connections on LinkedIn, if anyone wants to give it a try with me. Lots of folks showing up I haven't seen in a while.
I used this tool to close comments on old entries, due to the influx of spam on those entries. It works on MT 2.661. I only installed the 1.0, the 2.0 looks worth it too, and works on non-mysql installs too.
Thanks David for making this!
Yesterday I interviewed back in Red-West building A, the place where I worked almost 10 years ago on music for MSN. The building has not changed (and glad I can't say the same thing about myself.) The interview went as usual. I've been offered a job where my performance was worse, and I've not been offered the job when my performance is better. So we'll see.
This morning I'm going out for a one-on-one session to find out what's tripping me up in interviews. Besides bing a prima donna with a hefty sense of entitlement, that is. I don't know what to expect, but I really do want new information, such as I have a nervous tic I never knew about, or a combination of Turrets and sympathetic obfuscatory amnesia. Perhaps it's cooties. I'll let you all know.
Lately I've been getting comment spam from people, with names, and nonexistent URLs. For example, I would get a comment from "John Smith" with e-mail johnsmith@gmail.com, and URL of www.johnsmith.com. The URL is not a registered domain, it goes to site unreachable. What are people gaining from this?
Also, there is a bug in my version of mt-blacklist where if you put just a period in the comment text, and nothing else, the "Remove from blacklist" link does not appear in the notification to me.
What evil doings are afoot?
I have two points to make about the 2004 US election.
1) Why did we not nominate a Southern democrat to win? The answer is, we didn't know how important it would be to overcome the urban liberal snobbery stigma in order to win. Not only was this a strategic error, but failure to make it important showed our shallowness as leaders.
2) When is the last time you had someone like this sitting across your dinner table?
- in agriculture as a business
- not attended college
- likes country music
- goes to church every week
- self or family member in the military
- considers themselves blue collar
- can't change the channel fast enough when "will and grace" comes on
There are several characteristics that make up a good nation-state. These are, to begin with, that the citizens should speak the same language, share a culture, have geographical based boundaries for the land, that sort of thing. The same religion helps, as well as looking similar, but the culture sharing trumps both of them. Unfortunately this election has shown the United States to be a poor candidate for a nation. I have more in common with our neighbors to the north in Vancouver Canada than I have with the people who voted for Bush. I don't know what the next steps are for resolving that, but rather than race, or gender, or economic class, or any other way we divide ourselves, this election has proven that the most powerful distinction between US citizens right now is country mouse vs. city mouse. Speaking as a city mouse, I want to take it all back, every episode of will and grace, every fancy tall building or zoomy car. If growing corn in my backyard would unify us, to the point where we as democrats have *any* idea of what it would take to nominate someone who a) does not want to wage war, and b) can get elected, then I'll do it. (As I said, I don't know what next steps are.) But country vs. city is big right now, and we should have known better is all.
Wouldn't it be great if every weblogger warned you when they were going to talk about their latest not-so-greatest consumer experience?
I'll start with the unusual case first. My laptop is back, after being fixed. The warranty was expired last month, but they fixed it on warranty anyway. The tech even snuck in a repair to the monitor screen latch, which is normally excluded. I will buy a Toshiba again just to keep the same support staff. How about that?
Now, here are the situations I should be expecting but somehow don't. This is the "They'll do it every time" dept. (anyone remember that cartoon?)
Flexcar: They automatically withdraw funds on a certain date, so when I had to have them wait a week they treated me like dirt. Then they had another opportunity to treat me like dirt when I found out the hard way that nights between 11pm and 7am were no longer free. This doubled my bill, but did not factor in to getting better treatment, in fact, they were even nastier. I'm sorry guys, it's such a great idea, and I don't know who's abusing the system but it's not me. I hope it works out.
Shark Tale: This got good reviews, and I went, but it was lousy. I don't know what I was thinking. Not only did I waste $9 on my big treat for the week, but I also wasted the 2 hours of time the little one was napping. I could have folded socks, or done anything! As a consequence I'm not accompanying the rest of the fam to the Incredibles right now. I'm sure it's a great movie. It's just that it got great reviews from the same people who liked Shark Tale, so here I am.
Food Tangent: I just sent in the following letter to my favorite magazine for food snobs such as myself. You can pretty much guess what happened. Be warned. (As an aside, I recommend MFK Fisher's "Gastronomical Me", check it out of your library. Her food based trips through France were amazing.)
Greetings,
I am a food and wine subscriber and have had great luck with your recipes in the past. However, I wasted the better part of today on the “Braised Artichokes with Red and White Pearl Onions” by Marcia Kiesel, which appeared in the Nov 2004 issue.
Artichoke hearts are a special ingredient, and those of us who have never prepared them (except for the canned variety) need to be steered clear of recipes like this. They are expensive, and it can be physically challenging to work with the artichokes raw. The recipe calls just for the heart, but only after following the directions you realize you are throwing most of the vegetable away. This is the most egregious error of the recipe. Obtaining artichoke hearts should be its own step, with its own style, similar to adding soup stock as an ingredient, or pie crust for a pie recipe. It should not be included with the recipe itself, leaving the cook to choose their own method of producing them. I myself would have chosen to prepare the artichokes normally, and saved the heart for this recipe later.
With that said, I expect editors of food and wine to weed out recipes that have these additional time-consuming technical errors:
• Ingredient amnesia. Marinate the raw artichokes in lemon water, then also include lemon zest in the sauté, and then finally add lemon juice to the sauté but only at the end. If you want it lemony, decide when to have us add the lemon.
• Ingredient waffling. Saute with lemon zest, bay leaf, and oregano, but then after you’re done you must fish out these ingredients. I’ll give you the bay leaf, this is commonly done, but why not just add less lemon or less oregano and then leave it in the dish?
• Preparation overkill. Braising is a technique of cooking food that leaves a bit of a crunchy part on the edges, in order to enhance the flavor. This recipe called for braising of raw artichoke hearts for two minutes, and then adding water and essentially stewing them. Due to this stewing effect, there was no difference to the texture of the artichoke hearts than if they had been steamed, the leaves eaten normally as an appetizer, and then the heart kept for this recipe. The take-home is, if we are to do the work, make sure it makes a difference in the taste.
I had to throw my artichoke mixture out, because of errors I made in extracting the heart, but not until I was quite irritated by the recipe’s technical errors along the way. Please take my advice to not include raw artichoke heart recipes unless you devote a chapter to the hearts, with pictures, and consider the food waste and the time involved. Above all: does the extra work involved enhance the flavor? We all want our recreational time cooking to be worth our while.
Best,
-Elizabeth Grigg
(Seattle, WA)
oish! (hand on forehead as if fainting)
I have to tell everyone, my nerves are shredded and it's been hard to maintain professionalism in all things. I still don't have a job offer, and while I know the reason that they give for not hiring me is completely false, I can't stop obsessing about it. That dynamic has colored my other endeavors, such as:
- CalendarPeople is stalled due to my trusty laptop being in the shop again.
- Sudden attack of shyness, not wanting to beg Robert for an invitation to crash the Google party. Apparently I don't like discomfort. What a baby. For example, today a recruiter asked me "What company do you see yourself working at?" and I answered "Besides Google?" and she lost it cracking up. She was laughing in a bad way for me, because I'm so obviously not an engineer. (But I have a lot to offer!) Wow, look at that, I'm laughing again, it's so funny.
- Even my children's book is dragging me down. I'm done, but now I need to go through the hoops as if it was a big deal, find an agent and everything. Apparently it's not enough to be done. Perhaps I should convert it to Flash and post it.
- I'm even sick of cooking, oy, if I have to look at another marinade or stock I think that will be the end.
I have to remember that my mantra is to be the Bono of software, and if I remember correctly from an interview, Bono has a good day maybe one in three. That's about right.
For those of you just joining me: to be the Bono of software means:
* A long string of hits
* Compassion, empathy, and put on a great show
* Have fun
* Save the world while you're at it
The aforementioned recruiter told me some interesting things today. I'll switch back to dashes to enumerate:
- Insist on having your references checked before the interview. This is to offset the fact that you might not be the best interviewer on the planet. You need this ace in the hole, might as well get it.
- Really work your recruiter. Make sure they are prepping you well for the interview. The team should know what they want. Lots of times candidates with poor recruiters will end up interviewing just to help the team decide what they want. This is bad for everyone but the employer. If you want success, you should know what to shoot for.
- I should convert my resume to 2 pages. One page is for the human. The second page is for the computer, or the person who wants the skills in bullet point form. It's OK to duplicate information.
- Thank-you letters are big. Use them. I haven't been.
Sending lots (OK, some) link love to my dh's interview of his recent project for the Matrix.